. One of their contributors, tank slapper, has linked to Biased BBC as part of their discussion, BBC. Why? Another contributor, Ecks Ridgehead, has responded:
Yes, well that blog is hardly reliable, is it? Ten minutes of brief checking shows that the post Why Doesn’t The BBC Name Emily Thornberry?" is undermined somewhat by the fact that the BBC article referenced names Emily Thornberry in the second paragraph, and that if you examine the item about Daniel Hannan having had an invented quote attributed to him, you’ll see that the BBC quote "Daniel Hannan MEP told Mr Cameron to ‘stop playing games’ on the issue" is not so far away from his actual words of "Let us play no games of our own", and every journalst in the world tweaks quotes.
You are right that it is easy to see bias if it happens to be similar to your own views, but it is similarly easy to invent bias if it opposes them. Personally, I don’t think that any news source can ever be completely unbiased, but I certainly don’t think that the bias in the BBC is as great as many around here seem to think it is.
So, off I go to check, and yes, sure enough, long after the fact, long after the original story was featured on BBC Views Online’s index pages, long after the story was highlighted here, BBC Views Online have indeed re-edited the article, changing paragraph two from:
Sir Philip Mawer revealed in his annual report the unnamed MP then e-mailed the doctored press release on to the media as if it were an official release.
to:
Labour MP Emily Thornberry e-mailed the doctored press release on to the media as if it were an official release.
Unfortunately this article doesn’t appear to have been caught by the normally wonderful Newssniffer Revisionista system, but you can catch the edit here via Google’s cache, while it lasts.
The original BBC article, prior to its much later revision.
Moving on to demolish Ecks Ridgehead’s second point:
…the BBC quote "Daniel Hannan MEP told Mr Cameron to ‘stop playing games’ on the issue" is not so far away from his actual words of "Let us play no games of our own", and every journalst in the world tweaks quotes.
…let’s put this in terms even Ecks might understand. Consider:
“let us not engage in speeding ourselves” as equivalent to “let us play no games of our own”
and:
“stop speeding” as equivalent to “stop playing games”
…and then, hopefully, even Ecks will see that in the first case we are being asked to not start doing something, whilst in the second case, we are being asked to stop doing something that we have been doing. This is no mere ‘tweak’ – it is, indeed, “far away” from what Daniel Hannan said. If someone is being quoted directly, within quote marks, there is no excuse for not having those words exactly as stated! None! As it is, the BBC have subsequently corrected this calumny, noting that the original Hannan misquote was supplied by a news agency – a fact that was omitted from their original story – i.e. the BBC got the words, the wrong words, from a news agency and published them unattributed as their own (to support the BBC line on Cameron and Europe), when in fact, the original and correct words were available free of charge on Hannan’s own Daily Telegraph blog all along!
In closing, let us note that Ecks BoneRidgehead skipped past two newer stories to cherry-pick his examples (since demolished), and that he ignored more than five years worth of preceding blog posts and comments in his rush to belittle Biased BBC and defend the BBC – a BBC that, as usual, has done its utmost to cover up its errors and downplay its falsehoods – all for the bargain price of £3.5 billion in tellytax a year.
Update (Friday): As with the BBC’s belated confession to the provenance of their Daniel Hannan misquote, they have taken the unusual (though welcome) step of annotating their Emily Thornberry amendment thus:
Earlier versions of this story did not include the name of the MP as it was a straight report from Sir Philip’s report in which she was not named. We added the name, and some extra background, once we became aware of her identity.
They don’t, of course, admit that they “became aware of her identity” courtesy of complaints from various bloggers, rather than simply by doing their jobs using nothing more sophisticated than a few minutes with Google. Strange that.
I suspect that the reason Newssniffer didn’t catch it is that (for once!) the stealth edit has actually been acknowledged by a new time stamp.
However, the BBC have nevertheless successfully buried the story by LYING that it was an unnamed MP initially, then when the caravan has moved on they sneakily update the story thus fooling the likes of Ecks Ridgehead.
Newssniffer catches stories regardless of the timestamp – in fact, it would be even better if it explicitly made a note of the timestamp that was on show whenever it detects a change.
There are a number of reasons I can think of for Newssniffer not to know about this article (not that I have any more information about Newssniffer than anyone else) – but of course, the real question is, why does it take a member of the public to provide such a valuable service, capturing and displaying information that the BBC could, if they have nothing to hide, make available themselves?
Here is the NewsSnifer page for the Hannan revision, clear as day:
http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/74900/diff/0/1
Erm. It’s the Thornberry revision that’s missing, Firefoxx.
…let us note that Ecks BoneRidgehead…
Well yes he may be and he made a very weak argument but this is a little personal don’t you think? He may have critisised your site but did he call you names?
Oh come on Simon!
1) Ecks Ridgehead isn’t a real name;
2) It’s hardly the insult of the century;
3) In his rush to defend the BBC (something he seems to have a habit of doing), he blithely dismissed Biased BBC as ‘unreliable’ on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence – evidence that he could have easily checked in the comments here if he was interested in debating the subject rather than just rubbishing Biased BBC on another site.
Perhaps I should have just left his boneheadedness as self-evident though, just in case Ecks shows up here and is a similarly sensitive soul.
Come on Andrew, you can (and do) do better than this.
Sorry to be patronising.
Now eat your greens and get that bloody wind turbine erected.
Mea culpa! Call off the dogs!
I stand shoulder to shoulder with Andrew on this one.
People who make false accusations – whether of bias or incompetence – deserve a sound thrashing.
If referring to someone in jest as a bonehead is your wishy-washy BBC idea of giving them a sound thrashing then I think I can live with that JR. Would you like to thrash me first, or shall I thrash you? 🙂
As an aside, the concept of a ‘sound thrashing’ can still be heard in news reports from the Indian sub-continent – e.g. the crowd gave the criminals a sound thrashing before the police could intervene. Top stuff.
Andrew | Homepage | 02.11.07 – 3:06 pm |
following on with another aside, i still chuckle now and then when i think of an indian newspaper report in which certain malefactors were referred to as “miscreants” – so delightful, i thought (perhaps non-pc, too?)
then again, maybe it’s just me…
Andrew | Homepage | 02.11.07 – 3:06 pm
amimissingsomething | 02.11.07 – 3:16 pm
….and in the Indian papers, when the Police catch up with them, the miscreants are ‘nabbed’.
The original poster on that Pistonheads site certainly has a brilliant take on Al Beeb.
“Watching BBC programmes in the main is like watching your granny getting pissed – faintly amusing but really rather embarrassing.”
Any chance of a sidebar quote on this one Andrew 🙂
i agree. That must be quote of the year 😀
Er, far be it for a beeboid to defend the integrity of biased-bbc but the point of the comments bar is that is ironic.
So comments from Marr, Paxman etc serve the cause.
Drivel from some motoring forum does not.
Mea culpa indeed Andrew 🙂
oh dear
(dangerously off-topic now, but)
i’ve just noticed (being male, not without consternation) that malefactor is composed of male + factor
which, given say a gender comparison of crime statistics, is not without interest, wot?
It was a joke Sarah Jane.
See the yellow smiley face? It represents mirth don’t you think.
It’s hardly the insult of the century.
Yes this is true. His comments certainly do bring this insult to mind though!
Sorry Reg – that poor old smiley has to cover a multitude of things – this software needs a LOL or something to indicate a joke rather than general happiness.